Resolutions 2018

Happy New Year my lovelies. I hope you all had a wonderfully woolly time over the holidays.

In my usual style I’m well behind all those organised people who published their blog posts about their New Year’s Resolutions (or lack of them) before the new year actually started, and here I am, over a week into the New Year and only just getting down to it. But after being so successful with keeping my resolutions for 2017 (see here), I wanted to continue with resolutions in 2018 that left me with an equally positive feeling.

Last summer, whilst on the beach, watching the children make their millionth sandcastle of the holiday, I idly wondered if there were any knitting podcasts I could listen too, so I did a quick search on my phone and, to my delight I found there were indeed plenty. So in I dived. And what an interesting experience it was. I was really surprised to see so many video podcasts – I hadn’t really realised such a thing existed; this is partly due to my technological incompetence but also partly to do with the fact that, living in the wilds of the countryside, we have such slow and ponderous internet service and lack of mobile phone signal that we can’t actually watch much downloadable content without a maddening amount of buffering and the “whoops something has gone wrong” notification of doom appearing at all too frequent intervals. This will hopefully change at some point in the next few months as a Gigaclear are currently digging up all the roads, installing high speed broadband across our little corner of West Berkshire, but in the meantime, I’ve basically had to content myself to audio podcasts, which are easier to download.

A particular favourite of mine is the KnitBritish podcast by Louise Scollay. Listening to her podcast has made me realise I’ve been very undiscerning in my yarn buying. I’m a sucker for colour. I’m also a sucker for silk and soft squishy Merino, and the bounce of Blue Faced Leicester, but it had never occurred to me before, I knew very little about the provenance of my yarn, save for the hand-dyer who dyed it. Through Louise’s podcast I’ve come to understand it is possible to buy wool and know not only the breed of sheep whose fleece comprise the wool but also where the sheep live and even, possibly, the name of the shepherdess.

I’ve been a big supporter of locally grown food for many many years, shopping through veg box delivery schemes, at farmers markets and, since, moving to the country, at farm shops. We eat seasonally and try very hard not to buy products grown outside the UK. I do sometimes look wistfully at things like out of season asparagus in the supermarket but not buying it all year round makes the times we do have it extra special. I also shop locally as much as possible for other things; my garden is stocked almost exclusively with plants bought in local independent nurseries and my kitchen came from a small local company. I do primarily because of the money multiplier. Money spent in the local economy is spent many times over because independent locally-owned businesses recirculate a far greater percentage of revenue locally compared to national and multinational businesses. Going local creates more local wealth and jobs.

So, why wasn’t I doing this with my yarn buying? I don’t know. I don’t have any explanation for it. Possibly I’ve been high on yarn fumes. But no more. This year, when I buy yarn, I will only buy British Yarn. Yarn grown, or milled and dyed in Britain. I will be majoring on provenance. And if I can know the name of the Shepherdess, and the sheep, all the better.